Pakistan EdTech Blog - Digital Literacy for the 21st Century

Khud's EdTech platform opened up another front with a project focused on Technology. The purpose of this project was to give students a chance to enhance their self-learning skills and develop a unique gaming application. Khud shortlisted five talented students from the 1st year and 2nd year majoring in computer sciences from National College of Business Administration and Economics (NCBA&E), Lahore.

Often times, students from less reputed institutes fail to secure good internships and jobs. Khud doesn’t just want to create practical skills in the job market, far more than that, we aim to create entrepreneurs that can lead the next technological revolution in Pakistan.

The application development team started their journey in November 2015. After exploring different platforms, the team decided to develop an android based endless runner game. Their inspiration was the renowned android game ‘Subway Surfers.’ To polish their skills the team attended a seminar in Arfa Technology Park Lahore about game development using Unity 3D game engine. The team was fascinated by the features and the interface Unity 3D game engine offered and decided to choose it as a tool to develop the application.

Utilizing Google Sheets, they made schedules and roadmap of how they were going to reach their end product. In addition to this, frequent group meetings and online sessions were held to discuss new ideas and designs. The team highlighted that this entire exercise was not just work, work and work, but they also had good time together. Initially, it was challenging for them to manage both their studies and this application development. But the team efficiently divided tasks amongst themselves. Ahmad and Sobhan led the group and assigned the works categorically. Ahmad and Bilal were assigned to make the back end (coding), Uzair was in charge of creating user interface, Soban graphics and Hamza was our prime choice for SEO and marketing of the application.

The team nicked themselves ‘5xRivals,’ made a Facebook closed group where they discussed various issues. Initially, it was very challenging for them to manage the entire project, apart from limited resources and time management, the team faced social pressures. Frequently, their peers discouraged them by saying that their skills were too rudimentary for such an undertaking. After much consideration, the team chose to shun the negative criticism and prove them wrong by their hard work. A month later, after spending number of sleepless nights in front of laptops the team created a prototype of the game, in which there was a cube instead of character moving along a straight path. It wasn’t enough but it was relevant enough to let the team know that they were on a right path. Then they started to design an environment and selected a soldier as their character. Next, they made a desired model of a soldier and then made other essentials (obstacles, bonuses, power ups, visual effects, menus and others). They named the game Captain Warner 3D.

The team tried their level best to create original content, at times authorized free content was used and strict care was taken to ensure that there was no plagiarism. They very humbly acknowledge that this is the very best that they could produce with the limited resources at their disposal. The team behind the game was kind enough to share some comments regarding their self-learning journey.

Muhammad Ahmad Afzal:

“We believed in ourselves and developed our self-learning skills; now we can confidently say that we are at intermediate level with respect to game development, and now we will celebrate our success by arranging a trekking trip to the Northern Pakistan with our reward money!”

Hafiz Bilal Ahmad Khan:

“Such an opportunity by Khud, I hope they will carry on their good work to help, inspire and motivate students like us!”

Sheikh Hamza:

“Bill Gates said: you never learn in school, I think it is a correct statement, we cannot learn anything unless we try to learn it ourselves instead of counting on our education system to feed us skills.”

Uzair Lodhi:

"This was the first step towards a great future."

Soban Muhammad:

"Day by day we learned many new things, it was great experience of my life, for first time we produce something new. It was a good practice for our practical skills required in the job market. This is all because of Khud, they gave us an amazing opportunity. I hope that Khud and the game users appreciate our efforts."

The Team Behind Captain Warner 3D

The team behind the application was kind enough to give Khud some feedback. They have suggested that Khud should develop better infrastructure for the purpose of monitoring & evaluation. We are thankful for the efforts of these boys and wish them all the best for their future endeavors. Currently, the game has been downloaded in more than 8 countries and has an overall rating of 4.8/5.0 at Google Play store.